ABSTRACT
Military camouflage is a technology and an aesthetic which attempts to disrupt and to disturb. It first began to be systematically used by the British armed forces in World War II and was so in response to technological advances in the aeroplane as a weapon and to ever greater accuracy in targeting. Although the primary purpose of military camouflage is that of deception, there has been little sense of any unease surrounding the ambiguous nature, and at times, sinister character of camouflage. The predominant explanatory narrative is one of the ingenuity of artists in association with the efficiency of soldiers; camouflage is in this sense seen as a fantastical sleight of hand, the tree that holds a soldier on lookout or a city protected by a mask of seeming bomb damage. This unproblematic reading of camouflage may offer an interesting window on British military ingenuity, but taken at face value it offers too simple, even too certain, an account. In her studies of military geographies, Rachel Woodward has warned against questions of interpretative complacency or negligence when examining the geographical presence of the military and the militarism of culture; ‘[m]ilitary geographies may be everywhere, but they are often subtle, hidden, concealed or unidentified’. 1 Here I explore aspects of the geography of militarism by looking at objects and practices which were intended to be subtle, hidden, and, by virtue of the technologies of their representation, to remain concealed or unidentified.
